Agencies Less Satisfied with GSA Tech Programs for Connecting with Citizens

Federal employees were less satisfied in 2015 with the tech tools helping them connect with citizens than they were in past years, a new survey shows. 

According to a 2015 survey sent to more than 8,000 federal employees in 135 agencies, the General Services Administration's Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies received an overall "customer experience index" score of 78. That's down from 86 the two previous years.

OCSIT's customers -- other federal employees -- were asked to rate 18 services, including SocialGov, which encourages agencies to communicate with citizens on social media, on a scale of 1 to 5. 

Respondents rated programs on various factors including "satisfaction," "ease of use," "likelihood to return" and "likelihood to recommend." (GSA calculates scores by subtracting the percentage of responses with scores of 1 and 2 from the percentage with a 4 or 5, according to a 2013 blog post. GSA did not respond to Nextgov's inquiry as to whether the calculation has since changed.)

Administered annually for the past three years, the GSA survey covers OCSIT programs including DigitalGov University, which includes digital-themed training videos for employees, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, and contract center services, among others.

This year, OCSIT added the "ease of use" indicator to the index. On that measure, the agency's programs scored an overall 69 out of 100, according to an OCSIT blog post about the survey.

OCSIT's "Publications" program, GSA wrote, scored a perfect 100. Seven of the 18 programs scored above 85, while three scored below 55. GSA declined to provide more details about how individual programs scored. 

Overall customer "satisfaction" across OCSIT programs dipped to 79 in 2015. That's down from 87 in 2013 and 85 in 2015. GSA has not made public full results of the survey.

In its blog post, GSA shared a handful of responses to the open-ended part of its survey, including from one employee who wrote, "I have not heard of anything referenced here except for FedRAMP, and I’ve been in the government for 18 years! What are all these things?”

OCSIT wrote in the blog post the agency had implemented an "action-planning process" to help program managers respond to survey results, but did not respond to Nextgov's inquiry about what specific changes were being made.  

The survey, loosely modeled after Forrester's Customer Experience Index ranking, concluded GSA had more highly rated programs -- 38 percent -- than Forrester's industry standard of 1 percent. Forrester's index was calculated based on customer responses from about 300 public and private sector organizations.

Forrester analyst Rick Parrish told Nextgov the comparison is "a little misleading," especially as Forrester now uses a new set of questions designed to gauge the impact of customer experience on the organization's mission.